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And Wednesday is good because Emirates airline flight EK-241 will be sailing in from Dubai at about 3:45 p.m. — which is excellent.

“It should be here in about two hours,” says Ben Rotem, 15, who is what you might call a plane-spotter’s plane spotter.

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The Thornhill high school student is a purist, even by the exacting standards of a rare and unusual breed — aviation zealots who like nothing better than to gather at airports and watch flying machines as they take off and, especially, as they land.

“Most people, they see a machine,” says Rotem, who will enter Grade 10 this fall at Stephen Lewis Secondary School in Thornhill. “For us, we see the power behind it. For my age, I have a rather deep understanding of aircraft.”

Dressed in a grey T-shirt, plaid shorts and dark sneakers, Rotem intends to be an airline pilot. Just now, however, he seems to be every mother’s idea of an ideal son — clean-cut, courteous, a bit precocious maybe and, above all, passionate about what he loves to do.

It’s just that what he loves to do might strike some people as being a wee bit compulsive.

“My parents, they do sort of think it’s a bit weird,” he admits. “I’m the weird one in the family.”

“That’s a Dash-8,” he says. “Probably heading to Sault Ste. Marie.”

Just now, Rotem is occupying his usual summertime haunt, standing on a small patch of grass in front of a Wendy’s restaurant on the east side of Airport Road near the foot of Runway 23 at Pearson International Airport.

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Thanks to an evidently indulgent father, who drops Rotem off and later picks him up, you can find the camera-toting youth here three times a week in summer and once a week during the school year, for this is a prime location for plane spotting.

At least it would be if the wind would shift direction, which is what Rotem is hoping.

“Over the next hour, it’s going to come more out of the north,” he predicts.

When that happens, arriving aircraft should begin making their final landing approaches out of the southeast, and the Wendy’s on Airport Road will be a great place to observe the machines as they land, rather than a fine place to watch them take off, as is the case right now.

The sight of a large airplane taking off is reasonable impressive, but not nearly as impressive as watching it land because descending aircraft are at a much lower altitude as they roar over Airport Road.

The plane is an Airbus A380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world, with two decks of seating and a range of 15,000 kilometres.

Rotem is also looking forward to spotting a Cathay Pacific Boeing 777, scheduled to depart Toronto at about 3:30 p.m., bound for Hong Kong. The aircraft is famous for the immense power of its engines.

Armed with a Pentax camera, Rotem can easily identify the make and model of just about every airplane he sees at Pearson. What’s more, based on his prodigious research, he can share anecdotes and points of historical interest about individual airplanes, identifiable by their registration numbers.

Just now, the Cathay Pacific plane scales the blue sky overhead — and it’s a stirring sight. But it’s almost time for the arrival of the Emirates flight and still the wind hasn’t shifted.

By now, about two dozen plane spotters have gathered outside Wendy’s to watch EK-241’s descent, but the occasion is a disappointment. The huge aircraft approaches from the northwest, in the distance beyond Dixon Road, and is visible to the gathered plane spotters only after its landing — just a very big airplane trundling across a tarmac.

But Rotem doesn’t seem too upset. After all, the A380 will be back in two days’ time — and so will he.

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